CUORE

CUORE at BerkeleySearching for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay of Tellurium

The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE, Italian for “heart”) is one of several next generation neutrinoless double-beta decay (0νββ) experiments. CUORE will study the possible 0νββ decay of 130Te with a sensitivity to a half life of 9.5×1025 yr (90% C.L.), which corresponds to an effective neutrino mass of less than 50 − 130 meV. The primary physics goal of CUORE is to determine whether 0νββ occurs and, if so, to determine the half-life of the process, the Majorana/Dirac nature of the neutrino, the neutrino mass scale, and mass hierarchy.

CUORE is currently taking data in Hall A at Gran Sasso National Laboratories (LNGS) in Assergi (L'Aquila, Italy). The CUORE detector is a tightly packed array of 988 TeO2 bolometer modules, each 5×5×5 cm3 and 750 g, for a total mass of 741 kg of TeO2. Since the tellurium is unenriched, 206 kg of the total mass is the isotope of interest, 130Te. The bolometer modules are arranged in 19 towers of 13 floors each, with 4 crystals per floor (see the figure above). The CUORE detector is housed in a specially built cryostat and cooled to about 10 mK by a pulse-tube-assisted dilution refrigerator. When operating, the cryostat is the coldest cubic meter in the known Universe

CUORE is funded by the INFN of Italy, the United States Department of Energy, and National Science Foundation of the United States.